The Revenge Tragedy (Part II) Video

This video takes up where we left off in “Hamlet and the Revenge Tragedy: Part One.” In that video, we revisited the initial call for revenge: the ghost’s request that Hamlet avenge his father’s death. We noted that Hamlet’s indecision and internal struggles impede his action in the first part of the play.

This video will explore how the second half of Hamlet as a play continues to defy the expectations of a revenge tragedy.

Hamlet has been, from the very first moments of Act I, reluctant to carry out the absurd and generic task that is his as a character in a revenge tragedy – “The time is out of joint,” he says. “Oh cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”

Hamlet’s self reflection reveals that he is not a hero who will act quickly, or in accordance with the timing of retribution. It is not until Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in Act IV, Scene 4, that Hamlet describes his decisive course of action:

How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge!
What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
(Act 4, Scene 4)

While Hamlet does seem to make up his mind in this speech, Act IV also presents us with an alternate version of revenge.

After Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius in a fit of rage in Act III, Laertes (Polonius’s son) is driven by a desire for retribution. Laertes’s goal only intensifies when his sister, Ophelia, dies by drowning. Laertes’ vengeance serves as a contrast to Hamlet’s own hesitating, over-thinking character. This is a true avenger. When he bursts into court demanding satisfaction, he says,

That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot
Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother.

In other words, Laertes proclaims that he has a blood-bound duty to avenge his father’s death impetuously and bloodily, or else he proves himself not his father’s son. In contrast, Hamlet has been calm, reflective, passive, playful, morbid, and impotent in his own long-delayed quest for revenge – a quest which has led rather to an attempt to find motivation for revenge, to reflect on the nature of revenge, the nature of man, and the nature of himself. By Act IV, Hamlet has thought and thought but not acted. Laertes, in contrast, acts without thinking.

CONCLUSION
As we’ve seen, the play begins rather straightforwardly, if ironically, as a revenge tragedy – the king’s ghost spurs his son to revenge. In Act Five, like the Act Fives of all major revenge tragedies, the protagonist does kill the initial perpetrator: Hamlet kills Claudius. But he does so in such a roundabout, half-cocked, off-hand way, we wonder whether this really counts as revenge. The death of Claudius certainly lacks the poetic justice that vengeance seems to require.

In some ways, Shakespeare seems to have miscast his hero: he has given us a character whose accomplishments are intellectual and verbal, not violent and physical. By the final Act, it seems as though the playwright has finally given up trying to tie his hero down to conventions. Hamlet the character has forced Hamlet–the play– to diverge from the predictability of its genre. Hamlet as a character resolves little, but constantly turns over the questions. The play has turned from a simple and predictable genre play to one that is somewhat inscrutable, one that seems to value introspection over action.